“I don’t know what we’re talking about,” Dortmunder said, “but I think I’m getting caught up in it. Why do they do it in French?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because it’s more classy. Like chifferobe.”
“Like what?”
She could sense the whole thing getting out of hand. “Never mind,” she said. “The point was, you could be the aw-tour on this kidnapping idea. Like a movie director.”
“Well, I think that whole aw-tour theory is—” He stopped, and his eyes squinted. “Wait a minute,” he said. “You want me to do the job!”
She hesitated. She clutched her paper napkin to her bosom. But there was no turning back now. “Yes,” she said.
“So you can take care of the kid!”
“Partly,” she said. “And also because all of these late-night burglaries aren’t good for you, John, they really aren’t. You go out and risk life imprisonment for—”
“Don’t remind me,” he said.
“But I want to remind you. If you get caught again, you’re habitual, isn’t that right?”
“If I stay away from Kelp,” Dortmunder said, “I won’t get caught. And if I stay away from him, my luck’ll get better. I’ve had a string of bad luck, and it’s all from hanging around with Andy Kelp.”
“Like tonight? That store going out of business? You haven’t seen Kelp for two weeks, not since you threw him out of here.”
“It takes time to wear off a jinx,” he said. “Listen, May, I know I’m not pulling my weight around here, but I’ll—’,
“That’s not what I’m talking about, and you know it. These small-time stings just aren’t right for you. You need one major job a year, that you can take some time on, do it right, and feel comfortable with a little money in the bank afterwards.”
“There aren’t any of those jobs any more,” he said. “That’s the whole problem in a nutshell. Nobody uses cash any more. It’s all checks and credit cards. You open a cash register, it’s full of nickels and Master Charge receipts. Payrolls are all by check. Do you know, right here in Manhattan, there’s a guy sells hot dogs on a street corner, he’s on Master Charge?”
May said, “Well, maybe that shows Kelp has a good idea. You can take the story in that book, and adapt it around, and turn it into something. Andy Kelp couldn’t do it, John, but you could. And it wouldn’t just be following somebody else’s plan, you’d adapt it, you’d make it work. You’d be the aw-tour.”
“With Kelp for my actor, huh?”
“I’ll tell you the truth, John, I think you’re unfair to him. I know he gets too optimistic sometimes, but I really don’t think he’s a jinx.”
“You’ve seen me work with him,” Dortmunder said. “You don’t think that’s a jinx?”
“You didn’t get caught,” she pointed out. “You’ve been collared a few times in your life, John, but it was never while you were working with Andy Kelp.”
Dortmunder glowered over that one, but he didn’t have an immediate answer. May waited, knowing she’d presented all the arguments she could, and now all she could do was let it percolate through his head.
Dortmunder frowned toward the opposite wall for a while, then grimaced and said, “I don’t remember the book so good, I don’t know if it was such a hot idea in the first place.”
“I’ve still got it,” she said. “You could read it again.”
“I didn’t like the style,” he said.
“It isn’t the style, it’s the story. Will you read it again?” He looked at her. She saw he was weakening. “I don’t promise anything,” he said.
“But you will read it?”
“But I don’t promise anything.”
Jumping to her feet, she said, “You won’t be sorry, John, I know you won’t.” She kissed him on the forehead, and ran off to the bedroom to where she’d hid the book.
6
KELP walked into the O. J. Bar and Grill on Amsterdam Avenue at five minutes after ten. He hadn’t wanted to make a bad impression by showing up too early, so he’d hung back a little and the result was he was five minutes late.
Two customers at the bar, telephone repairmen with their tool-lined utility belts still on, were discussing the derivation of the word spic. “It comes from the word speak,” one of them was saying. “Like they say all the time, ‘I spic English.’ So that’s why they got the name.”
“Naw,” the other one said. “It didn’t come like that at all. Don’t you know? A spic is one of those little knives they use. Din you ever see one of the women with a spic stuck down inside her stocking?”
The first one said, “Yeah?” He was frowning, apparently trying to see in his mind’s eye a spic stuck down inside a woman’s stocking.
Kelp walked on down to the far end of the bar. Rollo the bartender, a tall meaty balding blue-jawed fellow in a dirty white shirt and dirty white apron, came moving heavily down the other side of the bar and pushed an empty glass across to him. “The other bourbon’s already here,” he said. “He’s got the bottle.”
“Thanks,” Kelp said.
Rob said, “And the draft beer with the salt on the side.”
“Right.”
“Gonna be any more of you?”
“Naw, just the three of us. See you, Rollo.”
“Hey,” Rob said, in a confidential manner, and made a head gesture for Kelp to come in closer.
Kelp went in closer, leaning toward him over the bar. Was there trouble? He said, “Yeah?”
Rob, in an undertone, said, “They’re both crazy,” and made another head gesture, this one indicating the two telephone repairmen down at the other end of the bar.
Kelp looked down that way. Crazy? With all those screwdrivers and things, they could get kind of dangerous.
Rollo murmured, “It comes from Spic-and-Span.”
A confused vision of people eating a detergent and going crazy entered Kelp’s head. Like sniffing airplane glue He said, “Yeah?”
“On account of the cleaning women,” Rollo said.
“Oh,” Kelp said. Cleaning women had started it apparently, drinking the stuff. Maybe it was a kind of high. “I’ll stick to bourbon,” he said, and picked up the empty glass.
“Sure,” Rollo said, but as Kelp turned away Rollo began to look confused.
Kelp walked on down past the end of the bar and past the two doors marked with silhouettes of dogs and the words POINTE and SETTERS, and then on past the phone booth and through the green door at the back and into a small square room with a concrete floor. All the walls of the room were lined floor to ceiling with beer and liquor cases, leaving only enough space in the middle for a battered old table with a green felt top, half a dozen chairs, and a dirty bare bulb with a round green tin reflector hanging low over the table on a long black wire.
Dortmunder and Murch were seated together at the table. A glass was in front of Dortmunder, next to a bottle whose label said AMSTERDAM LIQUOR STORE BOURBON— “OUR OWN BRAND.” In front of Murch were a full glass of beer with a fine head on it, and a clear glass saltshaker. Murch was saying to Dortmunder, “. -. through the Midtown Tunnel, and—oh, hi, Kelp.”
“Hi. How you doing, Dortmunder?”
Fine,” Dortmunder said. He nodded briefly at Kelp, but then looked away to pick up his glass. Kelp could sense that Dortmunder was still feeling very prickly about this, still wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to be friends or go along with this kidnapping idea or anything. May had told Kelp to go slow and easy, not push Dortmunder too hard, and Kelp could see that May had been right.
Murch said, “I was just telling Dortmunder, as long as they’ve got that construction on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, I give up on the Midtown Tunnel at all. At night like this, I can come right up Flatbush, take the Manhattan Bridge, FDR Drive, come through the park at Seventy-ninth Street, and here I am.”
“Right,” Kelp said. He sat down not too near Dortmunder, and put his glass on the table. “Could I, uh…” He gestured at the bottle.